in the name of zero

today… june 10, marks the first anniversary of my emancipation. it has been a challenging past year…

here’s hoping i can last another…

there.

i’m sitting here, listening to everybody’s love story.. and wondering, where the hell’s mine?

we planned to go ice skating since last august, and now that christmas is just around the corner… she has to go shopping with her landlady…

on a more lighter note, i’m going back to gentoo come 2008, december marks my half a year’s absence… it’s the waiting that is hard… now i’m lookin for any installer donors out there , i need two. 2007 x86 and 2007 ppc.

cheers

i’m fresh outta college and currently enjoying freedom. (mostly because it took me six years to get through) many of my classmates have said their goodbyes. some have already left carrying with them the promise of employment and all the luxuries and benefits that come with the degree they recently got. at this point though, i’m pretty certain that i won’t be using the calculus and advanced math concepts i learned from school. also the chemistry and some of the physics concepts.

looking at my graduation again this time with my hormones in check, i feel kinda sad that school’s over. afterall, university is the only pace in this city where you can find high quality chicks! usually comes in three flavors:

a) one with all the beauty… and rich.
b) one with all the brains… and rich.
c) one with both all the beauty and all the brains and above all… rich.

that’s that.

for the most part, i’m just slacking off these days, just watching full anime seasons everyday. sometimes, i walk (on my usual route) to the internet cafe near my school to play DoTA. quickly becoming a daily routine if you ask me.

faced with the prospect of getting work soon, my original plan was to make easy money by becoming a call center agent in some company some place up north. actually, i’m still entertained by that idea until now. recruitments will be held this coming april and me and my friends agreed that we’d give it a shot. afterall, the only important requirement is to be “able to speak functional english”.

summer also means that i must again take up a new hobby and/or continue my old ones. usually, i settle for learning a new programming language (of my liking) and doing some fun stuffs with my chosen PL.

coz no one wants a C guy nowadays… i’m practically screwed. so again with the prospect of getting work, i’m giving learning java and “some of the bullshit that comes with it” a shot. that is where the money is “apparently” nowadays. or so i think.

i guess she’s finishing up packing her stuff as i’m typing this entry. she’s going to cebu for a job interview and the thought about not seeing her again and missing her kicked in kinda late. i’m such an asshole.

thinking about her brings back vivid memories of our trip to cagayan! it’s a story i’ll be sure to tell my grandsons if i’ll have any…

this is niel. signing off.

yeah, so i’m back into doing stuffs that no one gives a shit about. yippie.

[ mutator engine frustration ]
after fooling around the idea of exploiting the packed arithmetic and logical operations of both mmx and sse, i now _officially_ think it’s a complete waste of time to use them in a decrpytor. the additional bytes (and cycles) incurred by movement/shift operations to setup the registers are not worth the effort.

[ school and hs batch 2001 alumni homecoming ]
second semester started last week. nothing much to look forward to except the yearly week long school fiesta (and christmas).

today, i become 0x16 years old.

the midterms are in full swing. and so far, i’ve finished taking exams in three subjects out of four in one day. i’m free this tuesday and wednesday which will give me more than enough time to brush up for my computer graphics class exam come thursday. as a special treat to myself and to my friend grainne, i plan to transfer some movie files im keeping in my hard disk so we can watch them the week after the midterms. they’re of good quality, but watching via computer isn’t particularly exciting as grainne told me. unless you have one of them 5.1 speaker system and a 21 inch computer screen. but those are rare luxuries here in my city.

so the plan was to make a vcd out of those files. now, i’m one of those few (i guess) who don’t keep kde around. as such, i don’t have the necessary libs for k3b. heck, i don’t even have the full gnome suite installed. only the necessary libs like gtk and stuff. just for survival.

here’s what i did:

1) fetch some ebuilds and placed them in my overlay
2) emerged ffmpeg vcdimager cdrdao
3) converted the avis to mpeg (ffmpeg)
4) made a vcd image out of the mpeg (vcdimager)
5) lastly, burn the bin to the cd.

i’m presently enjoying disc 1 of rurouni kenshin oav on our cheap cd/dvd player. :p

we were given some programs to do in our cs 217 class for practice.

1) palindrome checker
2) vowel and consonant counter
3) case inverter (uppercase to lowercase and vice versa)
4) string reverser
5) and lastly, a menu program that uses arrow keys (menu.asm)

i’ve done all the first four in both 16bit real mode (dos) and 32bit protected mode (linux) as the only difference would be the binary format (com vs elf) and function calling (realmode interrupts and int21h in dos in contrast to int 0x80 in linux). the algorithm still remains the same but i enjoyed doing them nevertheless.

[ the com file ]
it’s simply a plain 16 bit binary with entry point at 0x0100, ss at 0x07a3 and sp at 0xfffe. i found those values by messing with a debug.exe output with the values outlined in this site , hello world.

i quote from the site:

A .COM program has all its segment registers set to the same value, called the PSP, Program Segment Prefix, which DEBUG or DOS establishes at the first free area of memory. The stack pointer SP is set to FFFF, and two bytes of zeros are pushed, so SP winds up at FFFE. Then, execution begins at 0100. A .COM program basically uses only 16-bit offsets, so the segment registers can be loaded with anything (so long as they are equal) and the program will still work properly. Actually, once a .COM program has been loaded and is running, it can do absolutely anything it wants. It can change segment registers, or load more code, or anything else like this. (In Windows, it may be limited, but not when running under DOS).

my debug.exe output. relevant values are in bold.

dos@localhost C:\CS217>debug c:\cs217\test.com
-r
AX=0000  BX=0000  CX=00AA  DX=0000  SP=FFFE  BP=0000  SI=0000  DI=0000
DS=07A3  ES=07A3  SS=07A3  CS=07A3  IP=0100   NV UP DI PL NZ NA PO NC

i guess that’s all there is to it for the .com binary format. at this point, i scrapped a86 and used nasmi instead to make com files for our class. with the added benefit that i’m used to using nasm (intel syntax also) for everything related to assembly.

[ menu.asm ]
of the five assembly tasks that were given, i found number five to be the most interesting. (come to think of it, i’ve never did any assembly in linux that prints a colored string.)

make a program that prints a menu, then use the up/down arrow keys to scroll thru the menu choices. indicate that a particular menu is highlighted by changing it’s color. also provide a “quit” choice.

to grainne, you’ll find this list useful.

up	72	; up arrowkey
down	80	; down arrowkey
return	13	; enter key

to my classmates,

just incase you guy are sick and tried of doing a86 (hey! i am!), try out nasm for windows.

just add an ORG and bits directive in your listing before anything else like so,

ORG 0100h	; because .COM starts at 0x0100
BITS 16		; we are going explicit 16 bit mode

then assemble your listing by doing

nasm -f bin -o hello.com hello.asm

got into a problem with my usb thumdrive this morning as i was transferring an anime movie - naruto and the snow country princess. free space was virtually cut in half because of some filesystem inconsistencies.

i even did “rm -rf *” out of frustration but to no avail. i feared the worst…

df reports:
/dev/sda1 998M 413M 586M 42% /mnt/nokia

where it should be:
/dev/sda1 998M 4.0K 998M 1% /mnt/nokia

nothing that fsck.vfat can’t fix.